Can't stop crying

This weekend was tough. Friday night after Buster got home from the vet and his MRI he couldn't sleep. They said that he was resting comfortably after the procedure and he would likely sleep the rest of the night, but it was the opposite. We fed him half of his normal dinner as per the vet's instructions and then when he kept it down, tried feeding the rest 30 minutes later (he wouldn't eat it). CP and I went to bed but couldn't sleep because Buster couldn't settle down. He wouldn't lay down and kept panting and whining. CP eventually took him downstairs to sleep on the couch and Buster at some point did pass out. The next morning I ended up bringing Buster to the emergency vet because we were worried that he had bloat. Thankfully he didn't, but he did get an anti-nausea shot which seemed to make him feel better and he finally started eating again. The rest of the weekend and even Monday, Buster was not himself. He wasn't asking for petting. He just laid down in the house like a lump. I'm not sure if he was just exhausted from all of the tests and vets or if he was depressed. Thankfully yesterday he seemed to perk up a bit more and act like himself.

Meanwhile, the test results on Buster's spinal fluid are in and the results are clear. This means that he does not have an auto immune disease that we could potentially try to fight with drugs or anti-inflammatories. We had the option to do a blood test to see if Buster has specific genetic markers which are consistent with having degenerative myelopathy, but decided not to. Whether he has the markers or not, it doesn't change the treatment plan for Buster.

Right now he is on a steroid for the next 18 days to see if it helps. If he has DM then the steroids won't help at all as it is a last ditch effort. If they do help then he doesn't have DM and we can search out other ways to figure out what is wrong with him. The neurologist vet is pretty sure that it is DM because Buster has all of the classic signs and issues....the only abnormal thing is his age (6.5 years old). DM is usually a disease that happens in older dogs (at least 8 or 10 years old), so for it to present this early in a dog's life is rare.

I started crying during the conversation with the vet after asking how long we may have left with Buster. He said that generally about a year after you start to notice signs, the dog loses the ability to walk and control urine and bowel movements. Trying to get some sort of wheels or cart for Buster is not an option because although his issues are worse in his hind legs, the vet already noticed issues with his front legs as well. As soon as you put a dog in a cart, you put extra strain on the shoulders and front paws and with Buster's size, that is not an option. 

I started to see a difference in Buster by at least January of this year because I took him in to the vet in February (when we found out that he had two partially torn ACLs). So we may only have a few more months with Buster which is legitimately hurting my heart right now. For those of you that haven't been around these parts as long as Buster has been in our lives, CP and I decided to get a second Bernese Mountain Dog as a present to each other on our first anniversary. We  pushed off getting a puppy until the following spring due to some bills and by then we were almost a year into trying to get pregnant and starting to get some bad news about our fertility. Buster, especially when he was a puppy, was a great distraction from all of the bad news that we were getting, so he was able to fill the infertility hole in our lives until I was able to get pregnant. I'm sure my mental state would have been worse had we not brought him home around that time, so his presence has been so helpful in our lives.

We didn't know how long we had left with Koda when she started to show signs of a bone tumor....turns out it was only 5 months later that we had to put her down only a week before she would have turned 10. I do think that with Koda, we waited a bit too long and I don't want to make that same mistake with Buster. The one good thing about DM is that it is not painful for the dog, but I do think that CP and I are going to have to make a hard decision in the next couple of months as Buster and his abilities deteriorate.

It will be far too soon.